Posted on 09/11/2015 6:24:09 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
“I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see.”
— Donald Trump, in an interview for Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success, by business journalist Michael D’Antonio.
“Trump was willing to say and do almost anything to satisfy his craving for attention. But he also possessed a sixth sense that kept him from going too far.”
— D’Antonio’s conclusion to the book.
One often-underappreciated virtue of U.S. presidential campaigns is that their extreme length makes it very difficult to conceal what makes a candidate tick. (Barack Obama in 2008 was an exception, and he had help from an actively complicit media.)
This reality is finally catching up to Donald Trump.
As good as his “sixth sense” may be, Trump seems unlikely to avoid “going too far” in the long four-month stretch between now and the Iowa caucuses in February.
On Wednesday night, it came to light that Trump had made fun of rival candidate Carly Fiorina’s looks to a Rolling Stone reporter. “Look at that face,” he was overheard to say. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?” Trump now claims he wasn’t talking about Fiorina’s appearance, but her “persona.”
Before the news of his Fiorina remark broke, Trump spoke at an afternoon rally protesting President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and blasted Obama for failing to secure the release of four Americans jailed in the Islamic Republic. Then he misapplied a lesson from history: “If I win the presidency, I guarantee you that those four prisoners are back in our country before I ever take office. I guarantee that. They will be back before I ever take office, because [the Iranians] know what has to happen, okay?”
Trump no doubt remembers that Iran released the hostages it had held for 444 days at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in for his first term as president. But foreign policy experts I’ve spoken to say that for Trump to “guarantee” a similar outcome for the four Americans imprisoned there today will likely lead to one of two disappointing outcomes: a) the Iranians stubbornly refuse to lose face by appearing to knuckle under to Trump; or b) Trump will feel pressure to use military force against Iran after he is sworn in so he won’t lose face.
“Reagan was careful not to comment on the hostages before he became president,” Martin Anderson, his late policy advisor, once told me. “That allowed him to exploit a vacuum and helped bring them home.”
In addition to the nationalistic fervor he can’t help whipping up, much of Trump’s support is predicated on his self-proclaimed genius in business deals. But National Journal reported this week that his business instincts are greatly exaggerated:
>>>If he’d invested the $200 million that Forbes magazine determined he was worth in 1982 into (a mutual fund of S&P 500 stocks), it would have grown to more than $8 billion today. . . . That a purely unmanaged index fund’s return could outperform Trump’s hands-on wheeling and dealing call into question one of Trump’s chief selling points on the campaign trail: his business acumen.<<<
Then there is the matter of Trump’s net worth itself. In June, Trump announced his presidential bid brandishing a document that claimed he was worth more than $8.7 billion. By August, when he filed reports with the Federal Election Commission, the number had ballooned to $10 billion.
The game of hide-and-seek Trump plays with his “billions” was described by Tim O’Brien, a former New York Times reporter, in his 2005 book TrumpNation. The book quoted sources close to Trump as claiming he “was not remotely close to being a billionaire.” Trump promptly sued O’Brien for $5 billion in damages.
During the resultant litigation, O’Brien’s lawyers deposed Trump for two days in 2007. “Among the documents discussed was a Deutsche Bank assessment that pegged Donald’s net worth at $788 million in 2005,” O’Brien recalled in a Bloomberg View article this past July. “At the time, Donald was telling his bankers and casino regulators that he was worth $3.6 billion; he was telling me he was worth $5 billion to $6 billion.”
When Trump was asked about the wide discrepancy between his claimed net worth and the various independent estimates of his wealth, he revealed how his mind works. As D’Antonio reports in the excellent new Never Enough, “[Trump] explained the wide swings as a function of market conditions, and his own sense of the value of his name. This brand valuation — [Trump] estimated it was worth $6 billion.” Trump said in the deposition that the value of his brand “goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.” He then added some thoughts about his net worth:
>>>[Wealth] can change when somebody writes a vicious article like O’Brien. I mean, I didn’t feel so great about myself when I read that article. I would have said that — after reading that article I would have said that this psychologically hurt me.<<<
Trump is perfectly suited for the current media age. He provides enough outrageous quotes and distractions to remain such a source of endless fascination that the press has trouble catching up with his contradictions. D’Antonio says Trump “understood that in the media age, the frontier that might challenge a man or woman was found, not in the wilderness, but in the media. The boundary of this wilderness was marked by propriety, which was an elastic concept.”
Donald Trump has tested the media’s limits of propriety for three decades, and he’s usually succeeded in expanding them.
We will learn in the next four months just how far Trump can expand the equivalent political limits. As much as he may have mastered many of the lessons of the Robert Ringer classic Winning Through Intimidation, he might have forgotten a key one. “The secret to bluffing is knowing when not to bluff,” Ringer told me. “Some people don’t know when to stop, and they always regret it.”
Whenever Donald Trump's outbursts or "exaggerations" are too much for people to stomach, he'll just say he meant something else - or that he's a "showman."
If his history doesn't match up with the persona he wants, he'll just blame it on being a businessman, or that it's a lie, or that someone is out to get him.
Last night on Greta's show:
Greta Van Susteren pointed out that Trump told her in 2012, “Hillary Clinton, I think, is a terrific woman ... I really like her and her husband both a lot. I think she really works hard ... I think she really works hard and I think she does a good job. I like her.”
Trump explained that at the time it was his obligation as a businessman to get along well with everybody.
“I’m not going to say bad things about major politicians in this country when I’m running a major company where I need things,” Trump said. “I have international trade, I have international businesses. I’m not going to go around saying bad things about people.”...
“Donald Trump didn’t mean any harm when he criticized fellow GOP 2016 presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s face. He says he was just being the showman he is.
“Many of those comments are made as an entertainer because I did The Apprentice and it was one of the top shows on television,” he told Greta Van Susteren on Thursday night. “Some comments are made as an entertainer and as everybody said, as an entertainer is a much different ball game.”
I really hope you get some sleep at some point.
Your Trump obsession seems almost unhealthy.
Meh, going too far HELPS him.
Godzilla LIKES being electrocuted.
Pull out all the stops!
I love it.
I don’t care about Carly’s face. John Fund is a Wall Street toady.
Ridiculous. It was clear from day one he was a stone cold America hating Marxist, motivated by a racist grudge against white people.
I sleep just fine.
My “obsession” is not having a liberal, narcissist running on the GOP ticket and putting Hillary in the White House to finish us off.
I’ll give you 2 reasons why I know Donald Trump finds it easy and appropriate to lie. (Current history - I’ll leave the long, documented list of his liberal ideological positions aside for this exercise, along with Trump’s long, documented list of his support for elected Democrat leaders.)
1. He publicly lied (more than once despite it having been proven a lie) that Wisconsin was doing poorly and that it was because of Scott Walker.
2. He publicly lied about a Walker supporter coming to him asking to take him on to his campaign because he wanted to leave Walker.
Trump made my mind up for me when he answered a question about faith by saying, “I’ve never felt the need to ask for God’s forgiveness. I forgive myself when I screw up”, or words very much to that effect. Arrogance that blatant has no place in a leadership role as crucial as the Presidency. We have that right now, and it’s not working.
I would think you could give your Trump Derangement Syndrome a rest on a day like today. But no.
Trump hand wringing bump.
“In the World of Trump: John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he was captured, but Donald Trump was “in the military in the true sense” because he went to the New York Military Academy.”
Did you divorce Cincinatus and marry NickCarraway?
None of that worked. How has it helped old bland Baldy?
Trump: “You know, it really doesn`t matter what (the media) write as long as you`ve got a young and beautiful piece of %ss.”
Here is a real lie about Walker. He is polling at 50%.
You see no red flags with Trump?
Are you confusing this with...this ?
Oof: Chairman of Rick Perry’s Iowa campaign quits — and joins Team Trump
Thanks for keeping the facts and record straight about this fraud. He is to conservatism what Obama is to patriotism.
Do you have any idea how many POWs there were from the Vietnam era? Care to tell us how many of them received the Silver Star just for being captured? Care to recall how John McCain insulted the families of MIA during his Vietnam healing phase? Care to recall how many time this maverick stabbed patriots in the back?
McCain was a POW nothing more, he survived, heros didn't.
Except that the S&P 500 index is not just some unmanaged natural phenomenon, it's the accumulated performance of top businessmen like Trump. The Donald just happens to be the one industry leader with high enough profile, charisma, and inclination to take on being POTUS; the others are largely capable of the job as well, they just don't want to.
It's amazing that John "I got my old girlfriend's daughter pregnant" Fund was able to write the phrase going too far without flinching.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.